STAURT VARNEY (HOST): James, why is it that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has not been found guilty or convicted in any court or a military court. What's going on?

JAMES MITCHELL (ARCHITECT OF CIA TORTURE PROGRAM): Well, I'll be perfectly blunt with you: He confessed in open court in 2007, I think it was, to 31 capital crimes -- war crimes, including 9/11 and killing Daniel Pearl and killing Americans overseas -- but because of the naked narcissism of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, they set aside that confession and dropped all charges against him so that they could fly him to New York and try him in New York so that they could claim credit for his prosecution. When that fell through, he had to be re-charged. And I know that guy, and when he got charged a second time, even though he had said that he was willing to plead guilty and take whatever punishment he had because he wanted to get to paradise, when he got re-charged, he pled not guilty because in his mind he can continue his jihad through the courts because if you spend millions of dollars prosecuting him, it is not millions of dollars that you can spend treating vets or improving our immigration or taking care of the families of the people he killed. It's millions of dollars squandered while this flock of lawyers who want to do pro bono work for Al Qaeda gum up the works.

VARNEY: It seems, James, it seems like, that the authorities somewhere, authorities in America, lawyers in America, want to get this guy off, no matter what because, they say, you tortured him. You waterboarded the guy. They want to get him off.

MITCHELL: I did waterboard the guy. But -- let me tell you what, I did waterboard the guy and it was legal, it was effective, and it was authorized. And it wasn't torture because Eric Holder's hostile Justice Department investigated that for two years in front of a grand jury in Washington, D.C., and could return no case. But what we do know, what we do know, is that the lawyers would like to distract, distract people from what the real problem is and make him look more cuddly and more human. The truth is, it is not an either/or thing. He killed almost 3,000 people on 9/11, 2001, and I waterboarded him. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. He still deserves to have a military commission, be found guilty of war crimes and executed regardless of what happened. And none of, none of the things that happened to him inside of the CIA would have needed to have been brought up at all if Eric Holder and Barack Obama had not set aside his confession in open court and then dropped the charges against him.

And there's one other thing. One other thing I think your audience might be interested in knowing. And that is that just recently the judge in the military commission ruled that the confessions that they made to the FBI clean team, one who was not part of original questioning thing and knew nothing about what was going on, can't be admitted in court. They made that ruling this summer. So you got to wonder at some point who is in charge of that and what side are they on?

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CNN has announced it hired former Department of Justice spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores as a political editor to "coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign at the network." This hiring decision is surprising given Isgur’s lack of journalism experience, her conflicts of interest stemming from previous roles in the Trump Justice Department and multiple GOP campaigns, and the fact that she personally pledged loyaly to Presdient Donald Trump. But, additionally, Isgur repeatedly made cable news appearances where she pushed false and highly partisan talking points over the years, raising even more questions about the value of involving her in 2020 campaign coverage.